SkippyBing

Yeah, you've got to be really sure you've trimmed it right!

Yeah, I think the idea is to have commonality with the other Chinooks and forget about the SF side of things to some extent. A similar thing happened when some second hand Puma were bought from South Africa where the engines had anticipators (little things on the engine controls so when you pull collective the engines spool up before the rotors start slowing down). As the RAF fleet doesn't have them they were taken off, genius.

Obviously the 90 odd jets not in use would be kept as attrition replacements. Additionally rotating the airframes in use would extend the operational life of the Typhoon fleet. Oh and if the F-35 ends up only costing £55m per plane it'll be a miracle. Mind you The Register isn't the most accurate of sources when it comes to military aviation.

Oops

As I remember (and it's been a while since I've played around with it) the formula isn't in Imperial per se, it's just the units used to explain it are. e.g. for metric g=9.8 not 32, you use m or cm rather than feet (whichever SF uses, I can't remember), kg not lb. The only problem I had was figuring out what the metric equivalent of the inertia unit was (I seem to remember it's called a slug or something I think it's lbft/m). I think the formula stuff is originally taken from an FS tutorial or some such hence the units, SF is all metric. The moments will be for an empty aircraft as everything you add (fuel, weapons, pilot even) have a mass and a position which means the program can work out the moment of inertia. I think the value for Rx etc. is essentially a best guess for that type of aircraft (I remember seeing a table for different types of a/c somewhere), military aircraft traditionally being tightly packaged, whereas airliners have a low density in the middle (where the pax sit). Hope that helps.

Buff, as I understand it MOD being cheap b******s decided not to buy the full digital cockpit and avionics, but thought they could save money by having the old analogue stuff for the flight instruments etc. and the digital stuff just for things like the FLIR and Radar. This is much like going to your local car dealer and saying I'd like a cassette player, not a CD, and I'm sure all that electronic traction control is a waste of money too just take it out. So in the end Boeing made a bespoke Chinook which strangely wasn't much cheaper if any than buying the off the shelf fully digital one. Then when Boscombe started flight testing it they found it wouldn't pass the UK mil standards for various things mainly because some idiot had decided to have cheap old analogue instruments which no one else had ordered in about a decade and therefore tend not to be that well supported.

Hmm in a HAS.2, I'm not that brave!! I actually get chills down my spine thinking about flying one of those off a ship in the dark in wartime, a 180 scan radar, a doppler nav computer that drifts off on its own and a big board to draw your tactical plot on, cutting edge in the 1950s! Anyone got an HMA.8?

Ooo neat, the ARA Alferez Sobral, they shot at my old man. The subsequent Sea Skua attack just goes to show you should never piss off my Dad! Seriously though, very impressive work.

I got 14.874 seconds, although for some reason I used my left hand. and 16.161 with my right, still pretty poor!

Generally when people talk about unstable aerodynamics these days it's with reference to something like the Typhoon or Raptor where the flight control system deals with the unstable part of the problem and as far as the pilot is concerned it's perfectly stable. As an example if you can find the video footage of the Typhoon almost hitting the ground at RIAT after coming out of a loop look at the canards. The pilot was obviously pulling back on the stick as hard as he could, the canards however appear to be almost in negative pitch, this is because being unstable once the pull up had been initiated the airframe would just keep rotating in that direction. So to stop the thing stalling the canards were holding the nose down to the max AoA the wing could handle at that speed. There's actually three types of stability, positive where when you let go of the controls it returns to level flight, neutral where when you let go it just keeps doing what it's doing and negative where it'll keep going in the direction you pushed it to go. As it'd be very tiring to fly a negatively stable aircraft for any length of time it's really only used in aircraft with electronic flight control systems (and I think the Wright Flyer), the advantage is they are much more agile and for airliners fuel efficient (the CoG and Centre of Lift are much closer together so there's less trim drag). I hope that clears things up a bit! If I've confused anyone further let me know and I'll try and clarify.

...use the Force Luke, use the Force... Can't remember for sure (night flying is for bats and t***s) but I think if you've got an HSI in the aircraft (i.e. F-4) it still points to the carrier. Obviously if you've got a radar it shows up on that too in ground mode. I think the lack of lights on shipping is a major problem for naval ops, if only because you can't have a landing aid.

If you're just going to be rude, why don't you try and use capital letters correctly rather than on a seemingly random basis. Then people won't think you're rude and a moron.

The RPM thing may be because the max value for RPM seems to be 1 (not sure why). Anyway I think you want the left hand digit to be RPM and then the next one to be tenths and the next one to be hundredths. That way when you hit 100% RPM it should read 100. I'm not totally sure if that's possible as I haven't played around with counters for a while, if not you could probably replicate the effect by playing around with the Position and Value variables e.g. Set[02].Position=0.1 Set[02].Value=0.1

As a thought ref the stores management display, the Mirage Factory F-16 has a similar thing which might work as guide.

Top fun last night, shame I had to go to bed! Definitely up for some fun on Saturday, PM GMT is best for me, I could also be tempted tomorrow night.

I think yes, although I think the full weapons pack causes problems due to the number of files. I think there was a thread about it over at SimHq. It'd be best to have a clean install with just the NATO Fighters add-on. That limits the number of problems you can have. My vote would be for WoE with NATO 1&2 and that's all.

Hell at that price I'll commute!

The question is can I wait until then to buy a house. Well yes 'cos I sure can't afford one now!

Dante, Are you planning on modelling the different versions of the Leander e.g. Exocet and Sea Wolf versions?

Like Dagger says the M$ FS stuff still has it, but that's about all recently. I actually kind of like it, mainly 'cos I've started setting up my mouse wheel as a throttle so I can get HOTAS for free, and not have to use the keyboard to do any switches.

It's possible to indicate that something is on a hardpoint (check the Phantom's cockpit ini). I'm not sure if it's possible to indicate what it is although it may be.

It's worth digging out the Target Range terrain from the downloads section, lets you practice all that without people shooting back. If you download one of the mission editors as well you can come up with your own training package.

Yeah, I used to think that and even played around with changing the angle on a model kit. Nowadays I kind of like it. Mind you I am biased.

You could make an external store that looks like a ribbon, and then add a weapon hardpoint to the aircraft data.ini in the right place. Then before you went flying you could add the ribbon 'weapon' to the flight lead aircraft. I'm assuming here that the weapons side of FE works the same as SF/WOV/WOE but I don't see why it wouldn't.

I think the top left is the Airspeed Indicator and the right hand one is the Altimeter with the thousands of feet indicated by the number in the middle. It should be possible to get the attitude indicator work in pitch too, something like the entry below should do it. [PitchLadder] Type=PITCH_INDICATOR NodeName=pitch_indicator MovementType=TEXTURE_V ValueUnit=DEG Set[01].Position=0.5 Set[01].Value=-180 Set[02].Position=0 Set[02].Value=0 Set[03].Position=-0.5 Set[03].Value=180.0